not to start on the HexBear emojis.

what is the charge? using an emoji? a perfect Hexbear emoji?

“No the Katyn Massacre was good actually because…”

no one says this

as an anarchist who has organised with meatspace MLs, the topic of Stalin never comes up on its own. it comes up online more often because we’re not doing anything more important than just talking.

Stalin comes up in meatspace when some liberal confronts an ML and demands to know if they’re ‘Stalinist’ and what they think of the ‘Holomdor’. then the ML explains how ‘Stalinism’ isn’t a thing, they primarily read Marx, Engels and Lenin, and how Stalin was the leader of a team not a dictator and even the CIA’s own profile on him says exactly that, and then explain the ongoing threats the Soviet security state was protecting against and the cultural and economic trauma of losing 15% of their population in World War II, and the climatological history of the Southern regions and how the famine impacted more than just Ukraine and how famines were common in the region, and how the Ukrainian kulaks, protesting that their lands were being given to the serfs, burned crops and equipment and salted the land, and how famines were ended in the region under the USSR, and then ask the liberal if they care about famines under capitalism.

then the liberal says ‘yeah but Stalin was basically Hitler’ and then we in this group of anarchists, ML(M)s and syndicalists chase this fucking wrecker out into the street so we can get back to work.

i think any strong opinion on Stalin as an individual is already wrong, because you’re falling for the Great Man of History fallacy. i think Stalin is irrelevant unless you’re an ML cadre who needs to learn from the successes and mistakes of the USSR, but i think the history of the USSR is also important to any communist.

when you see an ML defending Stalin, it’s almost always because someone is criticising MLs based on an uninformed claim about Stalin, or they’re criticising Stalin from an uninformed position. and i don’t blame them: i’m all for criticising mistakes, but we don’t need to make shit up to do that.

i get that as anarchists we’re suspicious of statist leaders, but i don’t get why it’s so hard to understand that statists would defend a communist state. even if you see them enemies, you would benefit from reading their theory to understand their position rather than going ‘uhhh, why do statists defend states so much? must be they can’t read, or they’re just stu~pid lol must be because they have daddy issues lol’

you mean the podcast hosted by Robert Evans, the anarchist who writes for Bellingcat which is funded by the anticommunist National Endowment for Democracy which is currently run by former Bush staffers and is a literal CIA front?

In 1986, NED’s President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 1960s and that’s why it has been discontinued”.

In a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, NED founder Allen Weinstein said: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

that ‘anarchist’, who likes to talk over his guests, and his takes on countries outside the US repeatedly mirror the State Department?

as an anarchist, i do wonder if the antistatist who is funded by an anticommunist US government organisation might have a bias…

The link is broken.

i don’t know what you mean by that, but here’s an alternative: https://web.archive.org/web/20260210212413/https://lemmy.ml/comment/23662293

piefed.social

complaining about gatekeeping

okay

Can’t we agree to disagree on things?

no, because this is a thought-terminating cliché and we fundamentally disagree about how best to spend the time and energy of the movement. also, this is a community for discussion, not a soapbox; ‘agreeing to disagree’ defeats the purpose. electoralism and parliamentarianism are deadends, and thus electoralism should only be engaged with to the degree that it promotes our ideas, not with the intention to be assimilated into the current state.

Bernie Sanders killed Rosa Luxemburg, i won’t stand for anything less than the complete destruction of the orphan crushing machine, and the pandering of socdem/demsoc parties to the right-wing in Europe is a repeat of the early 20th century. we don’t destroy the system by being civil.

Taiwan is closer to being the Union in this analogy

mmyes, the defeated right-wing nationalist warlordists are the Union in this analogy. very good.

i would like to learn your secret: how do you become so informed on things you know nothing about?

What’s functionally stopping you from living on a commune on an empty dot on a map or a deserted island and making your dream of no government a reality with your peers?

the fact that under private property there is no such thing as an empty dot or a deserted island, capitalism is a totalising system and is practically inescapable but can be eroded, and that our politics as leftists are not just a vehicle for our own individual self-actualisation but about the liberation of all people?

a bunch of ‘leftists’ LARPing on an island are not leftists if they can afford to live on an island together and isolate themselves from the rest of the world.

… actually one does need later hardware for a phone that will work on 5G networks.

if i’m understanding you right, you’re saying we should be reusing old, functional hardware instead of producing brand-new shit (which just turns old stuff into ewaste). i agree. if countries repealed anticircumvention, i imagine there would be an industry for upcycling electronics.

Now they are just shot.

?

abstaining or voting third party in any general election is a vote for the republican candidate.

oh i was told by one of your ‘republicans’ that it’s actually a vote for ‘democrat’.

three votes for the price of one? third-parties sound pretty powerful.

fake ass electoral system.

shut your gringo ass up you ballotmunching Uncle Tom freak

demanding that the opposition not trail the right-wing on every single talking point and give a single fuck about the lives that the so-called US would continue to destroy beyond its borders is not accelerationism or ‘whiteness’.

when non-‘United’ SStateSSians have to listen to you about your fucking ‘damage control’ instead of actually doing anything you sound like two SS officers bickering over how painful our torment should be. we don’t fucking care about your comfort you imperial hog.

the collapse of US soft power institutions under Trump has been a fucking godsend for the rest of us trying to actually improve our nations.

stop running DARVO for your abuser and find a healthier relationship with politics.

https://vegan.bingo/#List

24: 100% vegan is impossible

True, we have to defend our fields from pests, displays contain animal glue and a few birds die in wind turbines. Should we therefore stop trying to reduce a lot of suffering where we can easily do so? Should firefighters save no one if they can’t save everyone? Immoral behavior cannot be justified by the fact that the alternatives are not perfect. To wait for the 100% solution, the current situation is too damaging. Veganism is the best option that we have.

something something ‘truly, to live is to be a bother to others’

EDIT: lmao i’m shadowbanned from piefed.social.

‘challenged’ is a euphemism created by abled people/parents to make themselves feel more comfortable about our disabilities. like ‘special’ or ‘gifted’ or ‘old soul’ or ‘spirited’.

i won’t dress up my disabilities. i am disabled. if that makes an abled person uncomfortable: good. the sooner i accepted that i am disabled, the sooner i could move on with my life.

EDIT: lmao i’m shadowbanned from piefed.social.

to continue the GP’s metaphor: trump is part of an infection entering thru the open gaping wound.

there is no soldiertariat. the person who joins the USian military is typically white, welloff and ideologically aligned with imperialism. they joined because they could and they wanted to. the military is the vanguard party of fascism.

i have been unironically told by someone who refused to install an adblocker: ‘what if i might get an ad for something i want?’

it’s breadtube, but Andrewism is still the first online source i’ve found to define ‘authority’ the way i and meatspace comrades have used it:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andrewism-how-anarchy-works#toc2 (~5 minutes to read)

he references Bakunin, with some generative critique.

i see. so we must escalate the security dilemma and bolster the capitalist military to defeat the Oriental Hordes to protect our managers’ very peaceloving and democratic ways of life. only once the capitalists have installed someone nicer to manage the Orient can we hope to return to begging the capitalists to relinquish their weapons and their power, of which they now have more of, and which many more people have been integrated into. in the meantime, leftists need to put their shit on hold. none of this will contribute to the rise of the far right or stoke xenophobic tendencies. i’m not a nationalist; joining the military is simply the forward-thinking thing to do. military service very famously attracts good people with good intentions. this is definitely not a right-wing position based in false consciousness and a Tom Clancy-esque view of geopolitics. this posturing has no relation to how we ended up in this situation. the fact that all of this benefits international capital is merely a coïncidence. mutually assured destruction means nothing to me.

with business going so well for the MIC, Gaza beach resorts should be open just in time for the postwar economy to swing back around! we could all use a little time in the sun after making everything worse.

/s

Use the tools that you have right now, and figure out something better once you have the breathing room to do so.

the military is not my/our tools. it’s the state’s tools.

our tools are being torn at to make way for a war economy, for a war that isn’t ours.

and if you tell me you’re not advocating for joining the military, then who does?

If it’s to provide opposition to Russian aggression, that is something that should be done. I am fully behind opposing fascism and imperialism.

‘social’ patriotism is still fascism. the proletariat have nothing to gain in a war waged under capitalism. you can oppose the war without supporting the military-industrial complex. revolutionary defeatism remains as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago.

just as then, this clash of civilisations narrative is creating a left-to-right pipeline and disappearing comrades into militaries or (if they refuse) prisons. anticapitalism is being sidelined for ‘national unity’ and ‘social cohesion’. money that previously didn’t exist is now allocated to US-bound tributes and funding for corporations which are in the business of fucking killing people, to support the nationalist programme of a Banderite State as these two capitalist countries grind each other’s lower classes against each other. surveillance becomes a ‘necessity’ to defeat the Evil Nonwhite (read: Nonhuman) Hordes. the Bad Refugees need to be expelled to make space for the Good Refugees. housing and funding for refugees and integration programmes suddenly materialises, and these Good Refugees get expedited (and sometimes exclusive) access to such help. literal nazi ideology and dogwhistles are rehabilitated to make all this more palatable.

where is the antiïmperialism in this? where’s the antifascism? i am convinced militarist-patriotic ‘left’-ists don’t personally know any comrades from Ukraine.

• https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/evasions-on-the-left-over-ukraine
• https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aotearoa-workers-solidarity-movement-the-betrayal-of-donbas-no-war-but-class-war
• https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-anarchist-antimilitarism-and-myths-about-the-war-in-ukraine